Four out of five (84%) peo­ple think more dri­vers should be trained in the skills need­ed to deal with the after­math of a road traf­fic col­li­sion, accord­ing to a new sur­vey from the Insti­tute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) and Dri­ver First Assist (DFA).

The major­i­ty of peo­ple, 79%, said that they would stop and help if they arrived at a road traf­fic col­li­sion (RTC) before the emer­gency ser­vices, and 44% have done so already, with a fur­ther 10% say­ing they would if they had received the cor­rect train­ing.

Of the 2,198 respon­dents:

• 50% said they would like to par­tic­i­pate in such train­ing them­selves, and 34% were inter­est­ed in find­ing out more.• A quar­ter answered that although they hadn’t received any train­ing they still felt they knew enough to make a dif­fer­ence and save someone’s life• Half of respon­dents had received some lev­el of train­ing and felt they would be con­fi­dent enough to put in into prac­tice• 75% would con­sid­er stop­ping to give med­ical assis­tance to some­one who was injured.• 18% answered that they wouldn’t get involved in first aid because they’d be afraid of not know­ing what to do or doing the wrong thing

The sur­vey went on to explore whether people’s hypo­thet­i­cal respons­es to sce­nar­ios matched up with best prac­tice on emer­gency respons­es and find­ings here were mixed:

• 78% of the respon­dents knew that find­ing a safe place to stop and assess the scene was the most impor­tant first step, before dial­ing 911 or ensur­ing all those involved are grouped togeth­er.• Sim­i­lar­ly, 73% knew that the only time they should park their vehi­cle to pro­tect a col­li­sion was to pro­tect life• 39% of respon­dents believ­ing that the emer­gency ser­vices would be able to trace their mobile using GPS to pin­point their geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions, which isn’t the case.

DFA founder David Hig­gin­bot­tom said, “Hav­ing a net­work of vol­un­teers on the road, trained in the skills need­ed to cor­rect­ly report a crash to the emer­gency ser­vices, or even to deliv­er life-sav­ing first aid, has the poten­tial to reduce road deaths by up to 46%.”

“First aid and giv­ing an accu­rate report to the emer­gency ser­vices will save lives. Dri­vers will be much more use­ful in this role if they are trained,” said IAM chief exec­u­tive Simon Best.